To a Far away Place
by Nyah
Summary: Had anyone asked, she, many years the wiser, might have said it was the way he'd quite literally given away his home to bring her back to hers that undid her.


Disclaimer and Author's Note: we all know this drill right? Don't own, thanks for reading anyway

1

Had anyone asked, she, many years the wiser, might have said it was the way he'd quite literally given away his home to bring her back to hers that undid her. And what a home it was—one that outran curses and passed between worlds on sails like wings so that he was at home in any harbor. But she was old then, with skin as fragile as a sacred text and no one asks the old about passion, even when their love is the stuff of legend.

That next morning, she'd say it was the sea and the way she finally recognized the rush and pull that rose in her ears whenever he stood close as the rhythm of the ocean itself rolling in the salt of his blood. As if the man were not a children's story so much as a creature from some ancestral, saline depths that had decided to put on skin. Prince of tides who sails like a demon, she thought, the progeny of a pantheon older even than her own.

But then she was sated and full of metaphor. Waking not ear to chest but near enough his ribs that his breath was like a shell to the eardrum of her mind and her dreams echoed with the tide. Later she'd want to laugh at the similes—strange and half-congealed—left behind in the tide pools of her memory.

At the time, she had far fewer words. Just the pull. His uncertain eyes, a sudden, anchorless blue. She could feel the return pull in her voice as it dropped to its siren depths, calling him a hero, tempting him to navigate that rockiest of shores. But he was a seasoned ship's captain who would answer the call of cunning or bravado but accuse him of good and he'd pass by, ears plugged with the wax of the worst things he'd ever done.

_It's okay. I understand. I remember. No one has to know yet. Today we celebrate only the victories no one can ever know about_, she wanted to say. _Tell me the rest of the story I was afraid to hear_. Instead she says, "You traded your ship for me?"

Emotions skitter across his face, the corners of his mouth hooked like an anchor seeking purchase. "Aye," he said, in that instant hopeful and abashed so he might laugh off kindness as stupidity if still she didn't trust the scent of it on him.

Instead she leans in with her whole body, deliberate as a choice long in the making. She kisses him slowly, in an inevitable sort of way, exactly as if she knew where this was going long before she ever sat down across from him.

His lips skim across hers and then press back, a push that pulls her in further, the way a treacherous current makes the ocean seem alive and anything but tame. She threads her fingertips through his hair, the strands electrifying the tender webs of skin between her fingers while the stubble at his jaw bites softly at her palms.

Emma forgets, every time, the potency of touch. She'd given her body away young and given it away frequently. And maybe it's because she doesn't quite regret citrus-vodka soaked nights under bleachers or wool blanketed truck beds awash in panting moonlight that her older, more conservative years have always felt more penance than virtue. Like the years she spent alone were punishment for never buying into shame, for not caring that she yearned for the simple pleasure of touch more often than she yearned for love. Touching him now was lights coming on under her skin. The nip of his teeth on her bottom lip was neon, the bump of their noses as foreheads touched was a porch light calling her home.

She felt the old recklessness of youth as she kissed him longer than was decent in a public place just a hundred feet and an unlocked door away from her friends and family. She'd always been a good kisser, lips lighting upon sensory nodes behind earlobe and jaw, with the surety of instinct. Emma Swan had never been a tease. Emma Swan kissed like a promise to her own body that soon you would make her feel very, very good.

It was the same recklessness that led her to pull at his hand hand, rocking back so their lips parted, realizing only then she was straddling his hips, had threaded her legs through the arms of his chair. She laughed, seeing no graceful way out, and leaned into him again, as much for a kiss as to extricate herself one limb at a time.

"Come on," she said, taking him by the hand. _Come see everyone we saved_. "Come meet my brother."

The expression that flickered across his face was the opposite of disappointment.

She led him into the diner by the hand, reckless in a fully new way.


End file.
